"Please, sir," said he to me on another occasion, "that there lumbago be
terrible trying to know what to do with it."

"Oh!" said I with alacrity, "nothing equals hartshorn and oil applied to
the small of the back with a flannel. You have a wife--"

"Yes, sir." He looked at me vacantly. "And yet, it's a beautiful thing."

"Well--yes, when it attacks one's deadly enemy."

"I've cut it down, and trimmed it out, and tied it up," said the gardener.
He meant the _Plumbago capense!_

That man never would allow that he was beaten. My eldest boy one day held
some pansies over the fumes of ammonia, turned them green, and showed them
as a _lusus naturae_ to the gardener. He smiled contemptuously. "Them's the
colour of biled cabbage," said he; "I grew them verdigris green--beds of
'em, when I was with Squire Cross."

One day he said to me: "The nurserymen call them plants big onias just to
sell them, I call them little onias; you shall just see them I grow, them
be the true big onias, as large as the palm of your hand."

I tumbled, by hazard, at Nice into a pension, where I believe I saw at
_table d'hote_ a score of the ugliest women I have ever had the trial of
sitting over against in my long career. I found out, in conversation with a
porter at the station afterwards, that this pension was notorious for the
ugly women who put up there, and it is a joke among the porters when they
see one very ill-favoured arrive by the train, that she is going to be an
inmate of the Hotel ----. The name I will not give, lest any of my fair